Wednesday, August 22, 2007

"You will be known by the company you keep. . ."

Neil Reynolds at the Globe's Report on Business notices what pretty well nobody on the Canadian left has noticed about the Canadian Action Party: It's a right-wing nationalist party that perfectly reflects a "dark and deluded populism" and "a strategic convergence of the reactionary right and the lunatic left."

Kady O'Malley at Mclean's mag provides an excellent and delightfully amusing account of the recent goings-on among and between CAP's Connie Fogal, the Illuminat-hunters, Freemasonry experts, Birchers and 9-11 Truthers here, but she needn't have apologized for initially referring to CAP as a "conservative" party. She ends up concluding that CAP is "if anything, a more left-leaning party than even the New Democrats."

I think Reynolds is wrong, too, when he says further North American integration would be a good thing. But he's right about the way just one consequence of all this craziness is that the "left" in Canada has largely dealt itself out of any rational debate about the merits of ideas like a common continental "security perimeter" and so on.

3 Comments:

Heard Pat Boone interviewed by a somewhat incredulous CBC Radio reporter on the weekend, and I was left scratching my head too. Boone admitted that actually he wasn't too intelligent or well-versed on the subject but if Lou Dobbs, whom he said knew lots more than he did, was against it, well, then so was he. (Actually, I can sympathize with that argument because if Dobbs is agin sumthin' I'm fer it... just kidding.) Boone was also worried about a secret 6-lane super-highway, that presumably would see all kinds of Hispanic and Canuckistani aliens traipsing about America. Yes, but what about all those entertainment has-beens who are trying to get to all the casino show lounges, don't they need this secret highway?

This Boone interview was not exactly a paragon of intellectual discourse, although I sensed that the CBC reporter was also somewhat frustrated.

Wow Terry whats going on.Sure be as critical as you want of CAP but to deny SPP NAFTA etc are not impacting Canadian sovereignty,democracy and the democratic process in general is patently absurd.What exactly is your gripe ?